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Canada should support call to bankroll troops for Mali: Editorial

Further Canadian aid for Mali should be conditioned on President Dioncounda Traore setting the country back on a democratic path. (SIMON MAINA / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

Mon., Jan. 28, 2013

People in the fabled city of Timbuktu and other centres in northern Mali are celebrating, as lightning strikes by French and Malian troops chase Islamist jihadists into the desert just 18 days after the insurgents threatened to overrun the country. But there is also fear that this is merely the first phase of a long, gruelling struggle. Few believe the insurgents will give up so easily.

“They may be regrouping for an attack,” Timbuktu resident Salou Touré told Reuters news agency. “There is fear of a guerrilla war.” It is a chilling prospect not only for Mali but for West Africa, and one that Canada and its allies cannot ignore.

As the Taliban and Al Qaeda did in Afghanistan, the Islamists have tried to carve out a safe haven for their extremism. They terrorized whole communities, destroyed ancient Muslim shrines, and imposed severe sharia law with its ban on smoking and music, forced veiling of women and stonings and amputations. Before they fled Timbuktu, they torched a library containing ancient scientific manuscripts in one final show of contempt for secular learning.

Given the prospect of a drawn-out conflict, the African Union has begun mobilizing extra troops under a United Nations mandate to help stabilize the country, and to speed up their deployment. In addition to France’s 2,500 troops the AU now plans to send 6,000, twice as many as originally intended, to help hold the liberated areas. Roughly 2,000 already are in the field. As well, Chad will send 2,000. That’s a major commitment. Mali itself can field about 7,000 soldiers.

But the mission will be costly. This week the African Union appealed for $460 million at a donors conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to train, equip and deploy the mixed force over the next year, and some experts peg the cost at $600 million or more. Buying time for the Malian government to reassert control in the north is a burden that impoverished African nations will be hard-pressed to shoulder.

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This is an area in which Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government can be of help. Canadian aid to Mali ran to $110 million in 2010-11, and we have provided emergency food, water and health care to Malians and others in Africa’s drought-stricken zones. But Canada suspended direct government to government support after last year’s military coup. So there’s room for Ottawa to help bankroll the growing African “international support mission,” in addition to helping France with strategic airlift.

Wisely, Harper has taken a cautious approach to Mali’s crisis, and is making a point of consulting with the opposition New Democrats and Liberals. While the Conservatives have rightly drawn a line against sending combat troops, Ottawa should be prepared to offer not only political support for the French-led mission, but also cash, humanitarian aid and other non-lethal assistance as the African stabilization force ramps up.

That help should be conditioned, however, on Malian President Dioncounda Traore’s government setting the country back on the path to democratic, constitutional rule. Traore heads a weak transitional regime run by forces loyal to army Capt. Amadou Haya Sanogo who deposed an elected government last year, compounding the country’s woes. Elections were planned for April, but the national crisis and fighting has elbowed politics aside, for now. Once Mali’s major centres have been liberated, those elections must go ahead.

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